Web Accessibility

It is our aim to make www.cheshire.gov.uk available to as many people as possible. Once someone has followed a link to our site we hope they are able to find the answers to their questions quickly or browse around the site with ease. With this in mind we have tried to keep the design of the site very simple and to follow some simple guidelines.

Images

Our site does not use frames or flash, to prevent user restriction. On the rare occasion that pop up windows may be present, we give warnings. All our images are provided with appropriate ALT tags, to serve as a text alternative to images when required.

To view the site without images, in Internet Explorer, go to View or Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > in the Multimedia section, remove the tick next to 'Show Pictures' > Click 'Apply' > Click 'OK'.

Content

We are registered with the ICRA Internet Content Rating Association.

Downloads

Our site includes various types of documents such as Word Documents, Adobe Pdf and Excel Spreadsheets. You can download reading software free for these programmes - links are provided on the pages featuring documents.

Screen Resolution

This site has been designed to be viewable at all screen resolutions, without sideways scrolling, although it is best viewed at a resolution of 800x600 or 1024x768 pixels. It can be viewed by all browsers, but we recommend version 4 onwards.

To maximise the size of the window, in Internet Explorer, go to View > Full Screen, or press the F11 button on your keyboard. To restore the window to its original size, click on the 'Restore' button at the top right hand corner of the screen (the one which shows two small, overlapping squares.)

Text

Our site does not allow you to change the font faces, background colours or text colours but it does allow you to alter text sizes. The Cheshire County Council website is almost exclusively black text on a plain white background, therefore we are confident that it can be viewed by most people.

To change the text size use the 'A' symbols on the top right of every webpage.

To change the text size in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, on the menu at the top of the browser, go to View> Text Size> and select the size you require.

On Explorer 4, click 'Internet Options' on the View or Tools menu> on the General Tab click 'Fonts'> Select your preferred text size.

Alternatively, holding down the 'Ctrl' key on your keyboard and scrolling the page either up or down with your mouse will make text size bigger or smaller in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera browsers.

To change your text size in Netscape Navigator 4, go to View> and select either Increase or Decrease font. You can also use keyboard shortcuts to do this in Netscape; 'Ctrl + ] ' for increase and 'Ctrl + [' for decrease.

More information on changing text sizes can be found here.

To view the site without images, in Internet Explorer, go to View or Tools> Internet Options> Advanced> in the Multimedia section, remove the tick next to 'Show Pictures'> Click 'Apply'> Click 'OK'

To maximise the size of the window, in Internet Explorer, go to View> Full Screen, or press the F11 button on your keyboard. To restore the window to it's original size, click on the 'Restore' button at the top right hand corner of the screen (the one which shows two small, overlapping squares.)

Access Keys

Access Keys allow visitors to press keys to jump from page to page instead of clicking on links to navigate. We have used the Access Keys as recommended by the 'Guidelines for UK Government Websites'. Hold down the Alt key and the number below, then press Enter.

Alt 1 Enter - Homepage

Alt 9 Enter- Feedback

Language and Translations

The site is in the English language and we aim to use clear and simple words to make translation and understanding easy.

You can translate a webpage on this website using free Babelfish software. Please see our 'Translation' webpage for further information.

Listen to Our Website

You can listen to our website using headphones or speakers connected to your computer. Please see 'Listen to Our Website' webpage for further information.

Availability

Our site is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Occasionally part of the site is shut down due to maintenance on our servers; we aim to give notice of this happening. We monitor the availability of our site and our success in the availability and performance statistics for Cheshire.